Lofteren

After the glue on my headstock dried, I cut off the excess wood around the edges with a pullsaw and a shinto rasp, then I brought it down to the proper thickness with a router. This was sloppy as hell because the clamp holding the jig that I made to the table snapped and the router slipped pretty badly. So, I took it down with a planer which worked out perfectly. Then I filed the edges smooth (ish) and went to work on the volute with a half round file and a power drill drum sander, drilled the truss rod access hole and rounded off the drop off from the neck to the headstock the same way. There's still some work to do here but it appears to be coming along pretty well.

Hot. Damn. Threads like this really make me realize how remedial my building skills are. Great job, man. It looks amazing.

That is exactly what I was picturing. Those look absolutely fantastic, btw. That is the kind of work I aspire to. I will probably wait until I have a proper piece of maple to work with before I give that a go. This red oak is horribly splintery stuff. The grain is so open you can blow air through it (srs). It is remarkably strong though. The neck on my first build is holding up nicely with heavy gauge strings (Ernie Ball Not So Slinkies) on it.

I went ahead and finished shaping the neck (roughly) and got a piece of 1x4 red oak glued and clamped to the back of the headstock. This is going to require quite a bit of thinning so I will get at it with a router and finish it up with a shinto rasp or a plane in the morning. I was thinking of making the headstock a little thicker than normal and recessing some circles for the tuning machines. I just need to work out a way to achieve that as all of my drill bits are pieces of garbage and oak likes to splinter and tear out a lot more than maple or mahogany. Any ideas?

It does look like that in the photo but they are the same size. I used the same template to route them both. I discovered that a 1x4 isn't sufficiently thick to make a straight, fender style neck and headstock. I didn't run into this issue with the angled neck on my last build because I didn't have to shave away some of the headstock thickness to make room for the truss rod access hole. So, I am going to have to veneer some wood onto the back of the headstock to beef up the thickness.

Lol, "damned"? Aaand she's good as new

I just thought it looked a little lopsided with the headstock being so small so I made it a little bigger this time.

She's all clamped up! I had a pretty productive morning in regards to this project. I had to put a little bit of wood in the pickup cavity to stop the neck from tilting down when it was clamped, it will be routed out almost completely when I reroute it. There is a little bit of a gap along the back edge that will need to be filled. This shouldn't be too much of an issue because I am going to paint the back of the guitar anyway. Before I glued the neck in I shaped the headstock by free handing with a router and then with a little filing. I am not sure how to take down the headstock thickness and drill the truss rod access hole though. If any of you have some techniques you'd be willing to share I would appreciate it.

I had the same thought so I made the headstock a little bit bigger on the second neck. Is there anything else I could do that you think would help?

Routed the truss rod and the taper on the neck this morning. Instead of using a handplane I used a straight edge and a router to carve the taper which worked exponentially better than hand tools (not to mention that it only a few minutes). I left .5mm of leeway for sanding.

I decided that the best way to go about replacing the neck was to route out the depth of a 1x4 as the center of the body is 2 1x4's thick. Then I will make the new neck from a 1x4 and glue it in place. So far the repair is going quite well.

I made a huge mistake on my guitar I planed the neck down too narrow. I am planning on cutting the neck off, routing a neck pocket and making it a set neck guitar instead of a through body. Does this sound like a good plan? Or are there better ways of going about this? Edit: what if I cut the neck about 1/3 of the way from the body at a sharp angle and made a scarf joint? Would that also work? Would I need to use polyurethane glue to make it strong enough?

The wall in one of our showers collapsed. Apparently there was water leaking in through some of the grout between the tiles and it rotted all of the drywall and 2x4's pretty badly so that project has unfortunately taken priority.

Oh I am sure you're right! I just want to get 4 or 5 guitars under my belt before I invest in some pricey wood. Believe it or not, that pine from home depot has incredible tone to it. This guitar is about as loud as a semi hollow body when it isn't plugged in.

Aaaand I ran into an unforseen problem. I made a truss rod slotting jig (its ghetto as hell but it does work) only to realize that I couldn't route the bottom 5" or so because the body got in the way of the jig. I had to freehand the last couple inches. It isn't perfect but it's not bad, either. Lesson learned. I also routed out the control cavity and drilled the jack hole which came out nicely. Then I started shaping the neck and cleaned up the carvings on the body with a drum sander drill attachment.